Design Process:

My Audience and their Needs

The audience for my capstone is educators. Any educator that is teaching reading. These will primarily be Language Arts teachers, but it will overlap some into other subjects, and I expect a fair amount of overlap into primary teachers are well. I worked with secondary students (7th graders) but since I focused on student motivation the data I collected is be applicable across grade levels. It might be a cool thing to explore how I could take my capstone project and also aim it towards students. I think this might be a neat aspect to explore in the future.

​My idea was to focus on how to support struggling readers, then share my findings with colleges so we could all change our practices. We all need to be doing everything we can to help our students to be strong readers. The CCSS are based on literacy across all content areas. The best thing we can do for our students is to help them to be better readers.Ultimately my audience is colleges, but the research I designed and carried out was student centric.

My LIL Site

A mindmap I made in the early stages of capstone design with Popplet, click here to see it full size

A major component of our program has been design. So it was important to me to make sure that my LIL site represented good design practices. I like things neat and orderly. So the pages that I design tend to be uncluttered. I am doing my best to avoid image dumping and random walls of text.

Early feedback about my site was that it was tidy and clean. This made me happy since it meant my vision was being translated to the viewer.

Weebly Skills Progression

When we started this course I already had some pretty decent Weebly skills. I'd taken a Professional Development course from my county's technology expert. So I was already familiar with the process. I even had a Weebly site I wasn't really using, so I converted it over to my Master's Course website and got to work right away.

My Logo

I had a very clear idea of what I wanted my logo to look like. Since my research focus was on reading engagement I wanted reading to be the central focus. The best way to express this in a still image was to depict a face interacting with a book. I knew I wanted it to be simple and clean, intentionally basic. My husband is a skilled computer technician and so I enlisted his help. I sketched a quick graphic with colored pencils and asked him to replicate it. I wanted the face to be blue and the book to be green, so that they would be complimentary and not clash. No problem he said. Weeks went by, my classmates all had their logos designed and posted on their pages. I had nothing. Turns out my husband was learning a new design program and creating my simple logo was more of a problem than expected.

The deadline was fast approaching, so I started playing with logo maker programs. The first one I created was fun, but the logo didn't survive the screenshot I took to get it out of the program. So I was on to program two. I ended up making several different versions. The key thing for me was that the face had to look like a face, and I wanted the words to be on the cover of the book like a title. This was a stroke of genius I had halfway through the process.

I had to build the face from scratch with only circles, triangles, and squares to work with. I couldn't figure out a good way to do it. This left me with a face that I thought looked like a mutant bowling ball, but once it was above the book it became obvious that it was a face.